title: Patterns of mitochondrial versus nuclear DNA sequence divergence among nymphalid butterflies: the utility of wingless as a source of characters for phylogenetic inference.
abstract: To investigate the utility of a region of wingless (wg) as a marker for molecular systematics, we compared wg sequences to mitochondrial COII sequences from twenty-two nymphalid butterfly taxa and one outgroup. Compositional characteristics of the two gene regions are compared, and their contributions to a cladogram inferred from the combined data set are assessed. Primarily due to its uniform base composition, wg appears to become saturated more slowly than mtDNA, although the two genes appear to be evolving at quite similar rates. We suggest that wg will be a useful source of characters for phylogenetic studies of butterflies, and perhaps other insect taxa, with divergence times up to 60 million years ago.
authors.affiliation: Department of Entomology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA. browera@bcc.orst.edu
authors.forename: A V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Brower
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: DeSalle
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D002080:Butterflies / Q000235:genetics*; D002467:Cell Nucleus / Q000378:metabolism; D004247:DNA; D018076:DNA, Complementary; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial; D029721:Drosophila Proteins; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010802:Phylogeny; D011518:Proto-Oncogene Proteins / Q000235:genetics*; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D051155:Wnt1 Protein
chemical_list: D018076:DNA, Complementary; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial; D029721:Drosophila Proteins; D011518:Proto-Oncogene Proteins; D051155:Wnt1 Protein; C074622:wg protein, Drosophila; D004247:DNA